Yvette Gellis on Katharina Grosse

Jul 20, 2018

The soul of French painting in the 1860’s and 1870’s was indebted to Diderot who, a hundred years earlier, wrote about theatricality in painting. He advanced the idea that a viewer’s experience of a painting should be that of a fluid, ongoing occurrence, rather than about witnessing a dramatic set up, as in the elaborate salon paintings in fashion at the time. An anti-theatrical approach manifested in the Impressionist movement, which blew apart the solidity of objects; everything was subject to blurring and increasing formlessness.